The amazing thing about Cory Schneider's career is the lack of valleys along the way. You can't point to a grouping of ten games in a row where Schneider's performance has been substandard except for right at the start of his career.

I've organized a chart looking at Schneider's career save percentage cumulative and from a rolling 10-game average. After the jump…

What struck me as odd is that this looks like a major junior goaltender. A good CHL goaltender will have a tough couple of years as a backup as a 16- or 17-year old, develop into an average starter by 18, and then have a great percentage in his 19-year-old campaign.

I looked at junior goalie Laurent Brossoit earlier in the season over at Buzzing the Net. Brossoit is a good example of this mould of goaltender, who posts a progressively better save percentage each season as he grows, learns the position as it relates to the league, and lets his talent take over. He's currently in the middle of a playoff run with the Edmonton Oil Kings, on a collision course with the Kamloops Blazers for Western Hockey League superiority.

But it's not necessarily a thing at the NHL-level. Steve Mason, for instance, was a pretty good junior goaltender who won a Calder Trophy after having an incredible first half of his rookie season. Since those first 40 games or so, he's fallen off the map and re-surfaced in Philadelphia, a franchise known for making intelligent, data-driven decisions, particularly when it comes to goaltenders.

I think what's scary about Schneider isn't that his rolling 10-game save percentage is .958, it's that .958 isn't the highest 10-game segment in his career to date. After a .959 between Games 63-72 in his career, he wound up with a .928 in Games 73-82.

100 games isn't enough, also, to determine whether Schneider will continue to grow at this rate. You need about 200 starts to really make the call, but the Canucks aren't working with that kind of time, so there's a bit of a gamble in going with Schneider.

There's also the reality that Reimer isn't on a hot streak like Schneider that's bringing up his overall number. I do find it quite funny that there's so much talk of Luongo's natural destination being Toronto when we really know, from the data, about as much as Schneider as we do Reimer.

Lalime's even strength numbers are actually similar to both Reimer's and Schneider's when you adjust for league average after his first two seasons as a starter, and he was the only one in this group who was a starter, so…

Point is, goaltending is voodoo and tough to predict. Schneider appears to continually improve. Bold prediction: Probably, he'll eventually fall back to earth and it will be during that sequence that Alain Vigneault loses his job.

Cam Charron is a BC hockey fan that writes about hockey on many different websites including this one.